Homework #4

Our class last week was a funny and interesting session. We were divided into groups and each group had first to analyse and then to presentate a case study from the internet. Our group got the study on the subject of:

"The Science of Social Timing Part 1: Social Networks"

For me it was very interesting to analyse our study, because it deals with the user behavior of Twitter and facebook. To illustrate the contents of the study, some examples from the study for you in the following:

• The best time to tweet is 5 p.m. (Eastern Time Zone).
• The ideal frequency of Tweets: 1-4 Tweets per hour.
• The best days to tweet: Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday.
• The best times to share on facebook are noon and a little after 7 p.m..
• The Central & Eastern Time Zone combined represent almost 80 percent of the U.S. population:
• West-coast companies might orientate on the Central & Easern Time Zone to reach the highest number of people.

All in all, I learned many new things in the last session, which were easy to understand and are very important to market a company, a product or yourself.
              

Homework #3

Adventure Twitter

I have never imagined that I would be a member of Twitter one day. But now the time has come. For me it is still difficult to use this Social-Media-Tool, but I think the more I´ll work with Twitter the better I´ll understand it.

In the last session of our class we had to follow five Twitter Accounts, which could help us to build our brand. I have decided for the following five:

Expedia
Hotels.com
Booking.com
Lonely Planet
TripAdvisor

These accounts are all about travelling, which is the main topic of my brand. Three of the five accounts I´m following have already started following me. This shows that Twitter is a big marketing platform on which the different brands try to exchange their views/products/...
For me it´s important to stay in contact with these accounts, because then I will establish a name for myself in this area.

Homework #2

(a) Why is it important to market yourself?

It is particularly important today, in the age of the internet, to market yourself, because you are in constant competition with a huge number of applicants for a job. Especially for me as an prospective journalist it is extremely important to move around the Net. Let us just imagine that I would apply for a job as an editor in a news desk. My potential employer will certainly research about me and the other applicants on the internet. If  I would not have at least a blog with some journalistic texts on the net, I would have very poor prospects to get the job as an editor. And not only because I have no texts online but also because the potential employer could think that I am not very internet-oriented.



(b) How can you build your brand online?

The first rule to build your own brand online is to create a strong recognition factor of yourself. In other words: Use the same profile picture for all of your websites/Blogs/Social-Media-Sites. You could also use similar colors for the website- or blog-designs. 
The second important thing to build your own brand is to connect all of your sites on the internet with each other. For instance when you just have published a new text on your blog you have the opportunity to share it with your friends on facebook. When one of your friends on facebook works at a news desk, he could be probably your next employer. 
It could be also important to "google" yourself regularly. Then you can see, what other see, when they google your name. In other words: If you find something about yourself on google, what turns you into an adversarial matter, you can try to get it "out of the net". 

Homework #1

(a) What do you think is Social Media?

For me Social Media is a kind of a tool with which you can interact with other people around the    world. You can use it either for private communication or for buisness. There are different kinds of Social Media. When I think about the word `Social Media`, at first I think about facebook. In my opinion it`s the most popular Social-Media-Tool. There are also other tools on the web: For instance blogs, twitter, LinkedIn and vlogs. All these tools have one thing in common: The communication among each other.



(b) Why are Social Networks important in the marketing mix?

The future of the marketing mix belongs to the Social Networks because of a large number of reasons: The most important reason is the potential reachability of almost every human on earth - and this reachability is nearly for free. I will explain this with the following example: When you as a marketer would like to make a product more popular, you have a lot of opportunities to reach people on facebook: You can run a competition, a lottery and much more and post it on facebook. If the people like your post, they will like or share it, so that their friends on facebook see your competition, lottery or whatever. It's like a snowball effect.